Lionel Trains on TrackReview

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It's slower than those kiddie train rides

By Jack DeVries

Perhaps there was a demand for a game that would help old timers relive the glory days on the bustling railroad era. That would explain why Black Lantern Studios decided to develop Lionel Trains on Track. Model trains stopped being cool back when television was invented. The train simulation game for the DS is an odd duck since it doesn't know what kind of game it wants to be, and the resulting product is a total train wreck.

There aren't too many train simulation games on the market, but for anyone that played Railroad Tycoon, this game will familiar. It's actually far less complicated than Railroad Tycoon because Lionel Trains on Track focuses almost exclusively on the trains themselves. Players have to build tracks to connect cities so that they can deliver cargo. That's pretty much it. Everything else players do in the game like upgrading cities, buying new locomotives or anything else is for the sole purpose of making cargo delivery faster and more profitable. Players have control over which cargo goes where, and so they can set up cargo chains to deliver goods to multiple cities. The entire process can get pretty involved and complicated. It's a somewhat odd game concept, since the act of organizing shipments and planning out deliveries is an actual job. Perhaps the developers were making the game for that bored train shipment coordinator so that he can play something during his lunch break.

That's one of the biggest issues with Lionel Trains on Track; it's hard to tell just who this game is created for, since the appeal is so limited on every front.

It can't be a kids game, despite the fact that it seems it should be. The game has the license of the most popular model and toy train company in the country. Many kids probably have parents, or grandparents, that grew up with toy trains and this game had the opportunity to be a great bonding experience. However, the game's combination of terrible controls and lack of tutorial make it far too difficult to get into. The Campaign Mode is the closest thing Lionel Trains has to a tutorial, with six scenarios that start off simple (build a track) to much more difficult (upgrade cities). There are no instructions for exactly how to build anything though. Players will just have to click around on the touch screen menu, until they figure it out. They icons aren't labeled, though most of them are easy enough to figure out, save for the cargo icons which are sometimes impossible to see. Even if a kid were to figure it all out (kids are smart these days after all), most children are going to find the pace of the game to be tedious. Progress comes slowly in Lionel Trains, and some of the missions in Campaign Mode could take hours to beat. The campaigns require players to earn a certain amount of money so they can continue, which means a lot of waiting around for trains to go back and forth between towns. It gets boring really fast. Add on the fact that there isn't a clear way to save the game and any chance this game had to appeal to the youth of today is shot.

It would seem that since the game isn't well suited for kids, that it'd be better for model train enthusiasts. Well besides the fact that nobody under 40 even likes model trains, the idea is flawed. The graphics just aren't up to snuff to be enjoyable. Sure, the trains are all real locomotives, ranging from coal powered, to diesel electric and everything in between. They look pretty authentic in the train selection menu, but when they're out on the track, it's very generic. Players can't zoom in very far, so the engines are always small. Considering how few people enjoy the Z scale size of model trains, this will disappoint them. With everything going on in the game, players won't really have much of an opportunity to just watch the trains go by anyway. They'll be far too busy navigating menu systems for cargo and building upgrades, keeping them away from watching their creations at work. When they trains move along the track they seem very disjointed, and don't move like a five car train should. All the maps look the same, even with the different areas of the world players can select. It's all just a boring mix of green and browns, with a couple cities in between.

Interestingly, Lionel Trains includes a "Sandbox Mode" where players have full access to every train and building upgrade, and have no money to worry about. In about 10 minutes players can create a huge locomotive empire. With access to everything the game has to offer, right off the bat, it becomes apparent that playing it the real way isn't worth it. The end result is just not cool enough to earn by playing the game for hours on end.

The Verdict

It's hard to tell just what Black Lantern Studios was thinking when it made Lionel Trains On Track. The game is boring, tedious, difficult to figure out, and has terrible controls, making it absolutely useless as a kid title. Likewise the graphics aren't great either, with trains that are too tiny to really be seen clearly, and environments that are indistinguishable from one another, making this game worthless for model train enthusiasts. A simulation game on the DS should be a perfect fit, but Lionel Trains is on the wrong track.